It’s a crumbling residential hotel on Eighth Street in downtown Oakland, with graffiti sprayed on its walls and cream-colored paint chipping from its brick facade. But to dozens of low-income Chinese immigrants, it’s home.

Now, Oakland City Attorney Barbara Parker is fighting to keep 34 immigrant households there months after the hotel owners began destroying the communal bathrooms and kitchen, Parker says, ruining the building’s interior as a ploy to boot out longtime tenants and jack up rents — all in the name of gentrification.

The property owners also seized Lunar New Year decorations from tenants’ doors and neglected necessary repairs throughout the building, leaving water leaks, gashes in the windows and missing floor tiles, and allowing sheet rock to spill into the showers, according to a lawsuit filed June 17 by the city attorney, the housing rights law firm Sundeen Salinas & Pyle and San Francisco’s Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus.

The lawsuit, filed in Alameda County Superior Court, charges the hotel owners and manager with negligence, fair housing violations and elder abuse. Such behavior represents the ugly side of Oakland’s hot real estate market, according to Parker. In a June 30 statement to media, she said the building owners had “publicly expressed” their desire to attract a “new demographic,” including tech workers.

In a tentative ruling last week favoring the tenants, Judge Brad Seligman rejected the defendants’ assertions that they did not intend to displace the residents, noting that the building owners had repeatedly offered to pay tenants to move out.

“The overall course of conduct of (the) defendants demonstrates a concerted effort by them to make the living conditions more onerous for the tenants,” Seligman said in the order.

Brought on behalf of 14 tenants, the lawsuit was heard in an Oakland courtroom Tuesday afternoon, at which point the defendants’ attorneys said they had agreed with the city on a construction plan for the building, but it wasn’t clear what it would involve or when it would begin.

In the meantime, the plaintiffs’ lawyers are still waiting for Seligman to order the demolition work to stop outright, perhaps as early as the next court hearing on Aug. 30. The judge will visit the hotel Wednesday to decide whether security cameras that the owners installed violate residents’ privacy.

“We’re one step closer to asserting our rights,” said plaintiff Wing Fu Mah, who moved into the hotel in February 2015 — before current owners James Kilpatrick, NAI Northern California/Highway Property Management and Green Group LP purchased it in September. All three owners are named in the suit, along with the hotel’s manager, JaEvon Marshall.

On Jan. 13, the owners posted a notice in English, saying they would begin construction on the bathrooms and kitchen the following week, according to the court complaint. Most of the building’s residents could not read the notice because they only read Chinese, the complaint said.

As a result, many were caught by surprise when a contractor arrived in February and began tearing down walls in the first- and second-floor bathrooms, leaving only wooden studs. Once the demolition work began, 25 households had to share two showers and three toilets. Tenants routinely wait in long lines to relieve themselves, which is particular hardship to tenant Maggie Lin, who is pregnant.

“It’s difficult to go up and down the stairs to use the restroom, and there are long lines everyday,” Lin told reporters outside the courthouse Tuesday.

At least one plaintiff had to defecate in a bucket in his room “to his embarrassment, shame and humiliation,” the court complaint said.

Building managers also trashed the curtains and Chinese scrolls that tenants hung on their doors, as well as the tangerines they displayed on door ledges as New Year’s blessings, the lawsuit said. Attorney Katherine Chu of the Asian Law Caucus described these acts as “a campaign of harassment.”

In court declarations, representatives of Green Group LP blamed some of the demolition work on the company’s hired contractor, Everlast Construction, saying it had mistakenly torn down walls in the second-floor bathrooms when it was supposed to demolish only some bathrooms on the first floor. Everlast was fired June 30 and a new contractor, Reed Construction, began work July 18, according to Thomas Kerbleski, a senior acquisitions analyst with Lakeside Investment Co., which is a partner of Green Group LP. Kerbleski denied that the building owners had acted in bad faith.

Representatives of Everlast Construction were not available for comment.